Friday, June 14, 2013

There were and are a vast sea of skills, talents, and resources
necessary to make DANGER WORD (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOH-TdsNMmo&feature=youtube), our
short film, made for less than 1% of the per-minute cost of a Hollywood
film. Is it “just” a zombie movie? No. It is a dark fantasy, a
tale of hope and love and family and the last 24 hours of a
childhood…with zombies.

That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it.

And
we’re doing it for both personal and community reasons. Both to
express ourselves and to teach others how to make films…or ultimately to
bring ANY dream that you have to life, on your own terms. To
demonstrate how to work with friends and family and your own childhood
yearnings to create something that works for YOU.

You need to
generalize from what I’m saying here, and see how this applies to books.
Businesses. Fitness. Relationships. I’m taking the risk of doing
this publicly, where I can fall on my face…or succeed, and you’ll see
every step of it. I am sick of people thinking their dreams are dead if
they haven’t reached them by forty.

Sick of it. So…here we go.

As
I said, in Step #5 you face the reality of needing to gather a circle
of allies who did and do have the basic capacities. Then you need to
clarify your own goals, and ask them to clarify theirs. If our goals
overlap, it makes sense to work together. But as “How to Make Friends
and Influence People” insists, you have to bond with people based on
THEIR needs and drives, NOT YOURS.

(By the way, the best way
to understand the motivations of others is to deeply understand your
own. The more honest you are about your own motivations…including the
role selfishness plays in everything you do, the easier it is to
understand, and motivate others. If you are often deceived or
disappointed by the behavior of others, if you frequently have the “I
didn’t see THAT coming” reaction, if you fall for lies and delusion
repeatedly…it is very likely that you are lying to yourself, about
yourself. That the lies you tell yourself to avoid pain, guilt, or fear
keep you from understanding the people around you. That your
relationships are actually based on "you don't call me on my b.s., and I
won't call you on yours. Best litmus test I know.)

So the first
question was: “what is this person’s dream, and would making a movie
with me further that dream?” Well…first ally? Tananarive. My wife, my
partner, my best friend. Frustrates the living #$%% out of me at
times, but that’s human relationships for you. Heck, I frustrate me, so
it’s inevitable that the people around me will as well.

But
she’s also brilliant. And has resources and perspectives I do not.
And yes, what she wants matches largely with what I want…sufficiently
that we can have a successful relationship. We had a match. We could
work on a short story of ours, “Danger Word” which would then have the
advantage of becoming a novel, DEVIL'S WAKE, then a shared dream, a
story that could be done “on a budget” in a genre currently popular, an
advertisement for the “Devil’s Wake” novels, a doorway to making a
feature film…you name it.

Luchina Fisher, one of T’s oldest and
best friends and an absolute sweetheart, was next to get on board.
The “Master Mind” principle says that a “Master Mind” is formed when two
or more people align in PERFECT HARMONY, in mutual support. That
means that Harmony is more important than potential resource, or the
size of the group. What you’re looking for is a “Supermind” formed by
brainstorming. A little conflict is great, nothing more than the
natural flow of spontaneous dance. But too much becomes like a brain
seizure, left and right hemispheres of that three pounds of gray Jello
in your skull fighting for control.

(By the way, this is
what creates the conflict between labor and management, or art and
business. There is a giant joke I’ve seen in publishing and Hollywood.
The writers believe editors and publishers are Philistines. Editors
often believe writers are spoiled children. Until…the writers start
their own publishing companies to “do it right” at which point the
writers who work with them start grousing the same way. Or until the
publishers/editors write their own books and stories…and start
complaining about the editors they work with.

The same thing
seems true in Hollywood. The management complains about writers and
actors. Let the writers or actors become “suits” and the people
working for THEM start making the same complaints. Hell, you see it
with voters and politicians as well. See this often enough, and I’d
think people would start suspecting that it isn’t that the people in the
other position are “bad.” It is that the nature of the positions
places you in antagonistic balance, “Child/Creative/Emotional/Impulsive”
selves warring with “Adult/Bookkeeping/Logical/Long-Term” self. Gee,
does this resemble the struggles going on in your own head? Ever make a
promise to yourself and break it? A sincere promise? Gee, were you
lying to yourself? Overly optimistic? Unrealistic? Now…when others
break promises to you, to you think they are “bad” or do you cut them
the same slack? Understanding yourself helps you understand others.
You don’t have to consider other people inferior to you in intent or
capacity to reject them, keep them from hurting you, or avoid the
negative consequences of their poor decisions.)

So…Harmony
between me and T is the first step. Early in our relationship,
realizing we wanted to both work together and stay married, we made the
decision that when we had business arguments, we could “go at it” hammer
and tongs, but the relationship itself was never, ever on the table.
Never threatened. That if anything was going on that threatened the
relationship that had to be discussed separately, and calmly, and
directly.

This freed us from the fear that “if I don’t agree, I
will lose my love.” It allowed us to really rip apart each other’s
ideas, without feeling personally torn apart. Because brothers and
sisters, you have to both feel free to offer crazy ideas, and know that
your ideas and concepts ARE NOT YOU. They are just expressions,
observations, desires.

We love and trust each other, and also
know that we are different people, close enough in values, beliefs and
goals that we can make a relationship work.

A RELATIONSHIP ISN’T TWO PEOPLE LOOKING AT EACH OTHER. IT IS TWO PEOPLE MOVING IN THE SAME DIRECTION.

Understand
that distinction, or you are in terrible trouble. Now, then…with that
basic unity established as the core “Mastermind” then add ONE PERSON.
Still have harmony? Expand brainstorming and add ONE MORE
PERSON…continue this process, willing to fall back to the previous
number if there is any lack of harmony.

T, Luchina and I argued,
but it was very very cool argument. Real respect, admiration, and
affection there. I liked what I heard and saw, and breathed a sigh of
relief—because Luchina had actually walked this path before, and
succeeded in producing a fine short film. We now had a group with all
the basic skills and connections necessary to accomplish what we
wanted. I had a good overall (but thin) grasp of the steps necessary to
create a 15 minute short, or THE GODFATHER. It was just a question of
how much could I learn, how fast, or how many people could I enroll?

There
is a principle in marketing: DON’T CREATE A PRODUCT WITHOUT A MARKET.
Great way to go broke. We could have tried to fund it out of our own
pockets. But you know something? Even hugely wealthy people very
rarely do this. They know that if they cannot enroll others in the
process, they are operating from pure ego, and are likely to fail.
Luckily, there is something called Crowdfunding. If we couldn’t make a
case to the public, and get them to help us FOR THEIR OWN MOTIVATIONS,
if we couldn’t convince them that this project was worthwhile enough to
help fund it, there was a very good chance that it wasn’t worth doing…or
that we didn’t have the skills necessary to create tribe and ultimately
market the result. If we could fund it, we had some of the critical
skills, and a potential winner.

So: the “Allies and Powers” step meant to

1)
model successful people to determine what they did, and compare enough
of them to determine the “critical path” to success (for instance: some
writers drink. Some beat their wives. Some overeat. These are
individual, negative behaviors. But ALL successful writers read and
write massively. THAT is part of the “critical path”, not the other,
idiosyncratic behaviors)

2) Determine which of these behaviors,
skills and resources you have, and which you do not. Those you can
attain in the time frame available, begin to acquire.

3) Those
skills and resources you do NOT have, or need to bolster, create
“Mastermind” groups of like-minded individuals, beginning with a single
friend, partner, or lover who you can, in this arena at least, trust
100%. Meet with them at LEAST once a week, preferably daily, and
brainstorm and clarify goals and determine daily actions.

4) Add
new partners to the “Mastermind” ONE AT A TIME, and see if you still
have harmony. A little dissonance can be spicy and valuable. But if the
new person disrupts your groove, no matter how knowledgeable or
talented they are, let them go. You cannot afford conflict on this most
basic level—it is like having a seizure.

5) Use the new person’s knowledge to clarify the plans, resource list and personnel roster necessary to achieve your goal.

6) Repeat the process as needed.

So
we created a plan to get to a 15 minute short film we could use to
understand the process of film making, have fun, make money, and
leverage our way to a feature, if we liked the process of working
together. If we decided we didn’t…no harm no foul. We’d back away from
each other like porcupines after mating (very carefully!), protect the
relationships, and take the knowledge into other ventures with other
people.

Created a time line, budget, resource list, and then said: "let’s do this."

About Me

For the last thirty years or so I’ve been a lecturer, coach, novelist and television writer. For the last forty years I’ve been involved variously in the martial arts, and for all my life I’ve studied and enjoyed yoga. Not that I worked at it as hard and honestly as I should have—I’d be a combination of BKS Iyengar and Bruce Lee if I had.
After publishing about three million words of science fiction (including the New York Times bestsellers The Legacy of Heorot and The Cestus Deception) and having about twenty hours of produced television shows (including The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Andromeda, and Stargate, as well as four episodes of the immortal Baywatch), I’ve got opinions on the writing life.
After earning black belts in Judo and Karate, and practicing the Indonesian art of Pentjak Silat Serak for the last fifteen, well, I have some opinions there, as well. And having struggled to live consciously since childhood...well, those opinions are probably strongest of all.